Taiwan’s system semiconductor industry has strong competitiveness to the point of being evaluated as’compared to the United States’. With the top of the world’s No. 1 foundry, TSMC, there are many world-class companies in fabless and packaging.
According to the market research firm Trend Force on the 15th, Taiwanese companies are expected to take the top spot in the global foundry market this year with a total share of 64%. There are many strong players, such as TSMC, which is equipped with ultra-fine and traditional processes of less than 7 nm line width (width of transistor gate), and UMC, the world’s third-largest foundry company focusing on more than 14 nm processes. Last year, TSMC recorded sales of 1.339.3 trillion Taiwan dollars (about 54 trillion won). It is less than last year’s semiconductor sales of Samsung Electronics (72.86 trillion won), but it is 69.3% higher than that of SK Hynix, the world’s second-largest DRAM maker, (31.89 trillion won).
Taiwan is also developing a fabless industry. Fabless competitiveness rose to the world’s second place (18.0%) after the US (61.4% share) in 2018. As the world’s second largest smartphone AP (application processor) company after Qualcomm in the United States, MediaTek, which has strengths in mid- to low-end products, and Novatech, which specializes in display driving chips (DDI), are representative Taiwanese fabless.
Taiwan ASE is the world’s No. 1 global packaging market. Packaging is a business that processes foundry-produced chips into a state that can be applied to electronic devices. Taiwan’s ASE’s sales last year were 477.78 billion Taiwan dollars (about 19.2 trillion won).
TSMC employs 9000 people, the largest ever this year. In order to expand the system semiconductor ecosystem, it is trying to secure a large number of human resources.
Reporter Hwang Jeong-soo [email protected]
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